The telecommunication networks of today ubiquitously deliver streaming media in the form of voice, video and data over a converged infrastructure. These different types of streaming media require differing network characteristics for guaranteed end-to-end delivery. Quality of service (QoS) mechanisms need to be implemented in the network infrastructure to ensure that each type of streaming media is treated in the most appropriate way.
The consumers of streaming media are not concerned about the complex mechanisms implemented in the network infrastructure to guarantee media delivery, but rather they are only concerned about the quality experienced in the usage of these media streams. Hence, there is a need to ensure that the testing of the network infrastructure include mechanisms to subjectively evaluate the consumer's quality of experience. The different types of streaming media have varying levels of tolerance to the network characteristics of media packet loss and variation in the inter-arrival time of media packets characterized as jitter. This leads to different levels of quality of experience for these types of streaming media based on varying network characteristics.